By John Helmer, Moscow

Something dark, something blacked out is happening at TMK (Trubnaya Metallurgicheskaya Kompaniya, Metal Pipe Company),  Russia’s leading manufacturer, and one of the world’s leading manufacturers,  of steel pipes for oil, gas, water,  and construction.

In an unprecedented triple change of mind, TMK owned by Dmitry Pumpyansky announced an initial public offering (IPO) of shares in its American subsidiary IPSCO Tubulars Inc. on January 29.  Just ten days later, on February 8, the company announced to the New York Stock Exchange it was withdrawing the share sale. The official reason was that “the continued market and economic volatility are not optimal conditions for an initial public offering.” In four more weeks, on March 9, TMK issued a new prospectus, reopening the sale of the IPSCO shares.

The company will not explain why it changed its mind,  or what has happened in the volatile New York market to justify restarting the IPO. Not a single London or Moscow-based bank  analyst identified by TMK as specializing in its business will give a reason. Moody’s rating agency, which lifted TMK’s outlook from negative to stable on February 28, has also failed to explain what is happening.

The answer, however, can be found in the small print of the two IPO prospectuses issued by TMK and IPSCO. TMK’s debt has been growing, the two prospectuses report, revealing that TMK’s lenders are increasingly anxious to be repaid. Two of the banks are relatively small lenders, but they have been demanding early repayments in recent days, as TMK’s share price fell after the IPO cancellation.

The biggest of TMK’s lenders is the Russian state bank VTB. It is pressure from VTB which has caused the sudden re-issue of the IPO prospectus — with one important change visible in the small print; that’s to say, invisible in the small print. VTB is insisting Pumpyansky drop the share price target of the first prospectus and sell for whatever price he can get now. VTB’s cash call has led to a share price target  in the new prospectus that is blank. (more…)

by Editor - Monday, March 19th, 2018
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Prime Minister Theresa May committed a blood libel against Russians in the House of Commons last week. This was the allegation that the Russian state and all Russians are murderers.

May has subsequently asked the Foreign Secretary and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) to correct the record by charging that only one Russian, President Vladimir Putin, is a murderer.

The Canadian Government was also requested by the British  to urgently correct the record May has been making in refusing to allow the international rules of the Chemical Weapons Convention to decide what happened in the poison attack in Salisbury on March 4.  According to the new Canadian statement, coordinated with the British, the international convention can be suspended by Prime Minister May in order to make her blood libel stick.

If this is reminding you of Adolph Hitler’s blood libel against the Jews, followed by Austrian support after the Anschluss (union) with Germany of 1938, it should. (more…)

by Editor - Sunday, March 18th, 2018
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Imagine an investigation for attempted homicide by gunshot without the gun, bullet, ballistics match, fingerprints, powder burns, witnesses, shooter, intention, motive.  You can’t imagine? Neither could the French foreign minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian. (more…)

by Editor - Thursday, March 15th, 2018
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By John Helmer, Moscow

An application to a British court for a writ of habeas corpus on behalf of Yulia Skripal is the last chance, British and international lawyers believe, to preserve for public accountability the evidence of the poison attack against her and her father, Sergei Skripal. The attack occurred on Sunday afternoon, March 4, after the poison  had been prepared at the Skripal home in Salisbury. The Skripals themselves were exposed several hours later at a nearby restaurant.  

Bulletins on their medical condition are being issued by the National Health Service. In addition, Salisbury District Hospital has been publishing daily Twitter feed on the public health risks since the attack, along with a notice: “Salisbury Hospital is open and operating normally. We are advising patients to attend for their scheduled appointments as normal.” When hospital officials were asked today what is the condition of the Skripals, they reported  they are “in a critical, but stable condition in intensive care… The police officer, who was also part of the initial response, is conscious in a serious but stable condition.”

The lawyers say it is already impossible for the evidence collected by the police and military investigators at sites around Salisbury to be admissible in a court of  law. This, they add, is because samples of the poison may have been tampered with before or after Prime Minister Theresa May (lead image) announced to the House of Commons the ongoing forensic investigation on March 12, and then announced the government’s conclusions on March 14.

Securing the chain of custody of the evidence required by British courts has been compromised by the state secrecy surrounding the case, legal sources believe.  It stopped altogether with May’s second statement to parliament yesterday.   In that speech, the prime minister implied that no samples of the poison have been despatched to the international Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OCPW) in The Hague.

The only accessible evidence about the source of the poison, according to the lawyers, is in the bodies and medical records of Yulia Skripal and her father.  Accordingly, the lawyers are now considering an application to a British court for habeas corpus on Yulia Skripal’s behalf, so that the poison and the allegations surrounding the attack on the Skripals can be tested by a judge, according to the British laws of evidence. (more…)

by Editor - Thursday, March 15th, 2018
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By John Helmer, Moscow

In cases like the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal, the only way to proceed is by identifying the evidence which proves with certainty what happened; or failing that, proves with certainty what did not  happen. Perpetrator, co-conspirators, method, motive, intention – all come later, if they come at all.  

At the moment, according to police and government releases and the British state media, the crime scene in Salisbury is being combed by at least 250 police officers; with another 180 military personnel specializing in chemical warfare. Dozens more electronic surveillance and cyber-warfare agents are also engaged. The crime scene locations include the Skripal house; the cemetery graves of Skripal’s wife and son; the Mill public house where Skripal and his daughter had a drink; the Zizzi restaurant where they ate before collapsing; and the public areas where they walked between house, pub, restaurant, the Maltings shopping precinct, and park bench.

At least 240 pieces of evidence have reportedly been identified as such, not counting the Skripal house, and 200 witnesses interviewed, including Wiltshire Police Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey. He developed symptoms  after being despatched to the Skripal house. That is, after the Skripals had been found and hospitalized.

According to Lord Ian Blair, a former Metropolitan Police Commissioner, “there are some indications that the police officer who was injured had been to the house, whereas there was a doctor who looked after the patients in the open, who hasn’t been affected at all. So there maybe some clues floating around in here.” Blair said this on the BBC.

His disclosure, also confirmed in several newspapers, provides the first certainty in the case: the Skripals came into contact with the poison for the first time inside their own home. They then went out to the pub and the restaurant. Certainty No. 2 – the poison cannot have been fast-acting for them at home. Certainty No. 3 – the poison was faster-acting for Sgt Bailey because he developed symptoms almost immediately at the Skripal house.

Follow the next eleven certainties. (more…)

by Editor - Tuesday, March 13th, 2018
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By John Helmer, Moscow

It’s novel for a US military institution to publish a report which contradicts its own conclusions, and adds up to evidence instead for the opposite of its proposals. This feat has just been achieved by the Naval Institute Press and Harlan K. Ullman in a book dedicated to the US Naval Academy Class of 1945. The title is Anatomy of Failure, Why America Loses Every War It Starts.

Ullman’s case is that because the US military lacks a “brains-based approach to strategic thinking”, it keeps losing the wars it starts. Ullman isn’t against the US starting wars. What he proposes is that the only brains for winning these wars are his own. Naturally, the London media have clicked their collective heels, saluting Ullman with reviews declaring, among other things, that  “there is not an army in the world that could stand up to the Americans in a fair fight. But winning wars is a different matter”.

In short, the adversaries of the US don’t fight fair. They win by fighting dirty. Americans need to use their brains, er Ullman’s brains, to compensate.

What those brains propose  is a combination of  “extensive knowledge and understanding of the enemy at all levels, brilliance in execution, rapidity, and sufficient control of the environment in all dimensions to impose our will.”

Ullman expands the IMPOSE-OUR-WILL phrase into a warfighting doctrine he claims to have invented himself in 1994. He was sitting, he claims, on a Pentagon committee of retired generals and admirals  he calls by their diminutives – Bud, Fred, Chuck, Tom, Jim and Snuffy.  Ullman says he first called the doctrine “shock and awe”.  But this is Ullman’s selfie, as fake as the photograph on the book’s dust jacket (lead image, left). This is also Ullman’s recapitulation of the old force concentration and mobility doctrines of Julius Caesar, Richard the Lionheart, Napoleon, German blitzkrieg, and Georgy Zhukov. 

It’s a battlefield idea which,  as the Germans learned on the Soviet Front, doesn’t win wars. The Americans are also learning the same these days on the Syrian,  Ukrainian, Korean and South China Sea fronts where they lack air superiority and on the ground have no better than parity of firepower  with the other side. Ullman and the US Navy have produced this book revealing they still don’t comprehend.   

Ullman is better known in Washington for boots on his own ground, according to the testimony of a local brothel madam who identified him publicly as her client before she was prosecuted and committed suicide. That’s a doctrine of schlock and whore.

(more…)

by Editor - Sunday, March 11th, 2018
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By John Helmer, Moscow

“Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.”

That was Jesus Christ (lead image, left) talking, not German Gref (lead image, left), chief executive of Sberbank and the most powerful banker in Russia. The children Gref has been talking about are  paying clients of a new Moscow school established by Yana Gref (image, far right),German’s  second wife,  who is financed by Sberbank. And also Oleg Gref, son by Gref’s first wife, whose asset appraisal and consulting business depends on contracts from Sberbank. The kingdom of heaven belonging to Yana Gref is called Khoroshevskaya progymnasium  – for short,  Khoroshkola (Хорошкола); the one belonging to Oleg Gref is called Brayne Asset and Change Management. 

When money flows from Gref’s bank to these relatives and their businesses, the relationship is understood in international anti-corruption practice to be nepotism. Originally an Italian word meaning nephew, the term referred to the practice of medieval Catholic Church cardinals and popes, purportedly celibate and childless, of promoting and enriching their kin. It means the same in Russian (непотизм).  The Russian language makes doubly sure everybody knows this crime by having a word of local derivation to mean the same; that’s kumovstvo (кумовство).

In 2013, the State Duma proposed to make nepotism unlawful by adding an amendment to the Anti-Corruption Law of 2008.    This provision made it illegal in Russia for money to be paid from state agencies, state corporations or state banks to organisations whose directors, deputy directors and chief accountants are close relatives of the directors, deputy directors or chief accountants of the state agency which is the source of the money. 

But the amendment failed to pass. Nepotism (непотизм, кумовство) is missing from Russian law and current practice. It’s legal; the Gref family proves it.

The Gref family nepotism is not breaking news. It has been more frequently reported by Russian journalists than for any other Russian banker or minister of state. Also, Gref has been more thoroughly exposed in the press than his business friend, the grand larcenist, fraudster, tax felon and money-launderer Suleiman Kerimov; the details of those allegations (repeat allegations) can be read here. 

The unreported novelty in today’s story is how Russian law and those who enact it have allowed a loophole for Gref to get away with what are serious felonies in other places.

(more…)

by Editor - Thursday, March 8th, 2018
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By David O’Brien, Boston

The mainstream media (MSM) lie constantly.

Writers in the alternative media work hard to expose these lies as they appear each day. But there is only so much they can catch in real time. Sometimes, looking back at an old story can give you a better understanding of exactly what happened, especially since you can include events that occurred after the initial story disappeared from the headlines.

I did this for a story that took place in October of 2014, when Sweden’s military conducted a massive search for what they were convinced was a Russian submarine lurking in their territorial waters. The story was headline news for a week straight, and people who follow the news most likely remember it to this day. (more…)

by Editor - Monday, March 5th, 2018
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By John Helmer, Moscow

Still coughing from the effects of the influenza which has infected most of Europe this winter, President Vladimir Putin has declared that for his last term in office, Russia is at war with the United States.

In his Federal Assembly speech on March 1, Putin also made sure that for his succession, he intends  the Russian military-industrial complex to prevail over the oligarchs on whom Kremlin rule has depended since 1996.  Politically, this means the rise  of Dmitry Rogozin, currently deputy prime minister in charge of the defence sector,  and Sergei Shoigu, the defence minister. Putin has signalled he intends the defeat of the pro-American business faction in Moscow, which US sanctions have been attempting to promote since 2014. (more…)

by Editor - Sunday, March 4th, 2018
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By John Helmer, Moscow

One of the Central Bank of Russia (CBR) officials responsible for the state takeover and subsequent collapse of Trust Bank and Otkritie Bank has been removed from office for the second time in fifteen months.  Mikhail Sukhov (lead image, right), a deputy governor of the CBR responsible for regulating Russia’s biggest banks, was ousted from the Central Bank in October 2016. Hired by the state VTB Bank the following month, he was removed by VTB this week. 

A Moscow newspaper reports Sukhov was ousted because he was unable to perform his role at VTB “in strengthening mutual understanding with the regulator [Central Bank], which, in fact, was his key task.” The newspaper, reporting VTB sources, hints that Sukhov’s job was a sinecure to cover up what had happened at the Central Bank. VTB, the bank told reporters, “does not expect his responsibilities will be redistributed between the relevant chairmen.” 

Ilya Yurov, the former chief executive and control shareholder of Trust Bank, commented from London that Sukhov had “played an important role in Otkritie’s conspiracy” to take over Trust Bank’s assets.   Yurov’s version of where the $4 billion in money reportedly missing from the Trust-Otkritie combination since 2014 can be read here.  

Until Sukhov’s ouster, Elvira Nabiullina (lead image, left), who heads the Central Bank, had assigned him to  “coordinate and control the work of the Systemically Important Banks Supervision Department, the Credit Institutions Licensing and Financial Rehabilitation Department and the International Cooperation and Public Communications Department.”  Neither the CBR’s press office nor Sukhov commented at the time  on his ouster.  Sukhov and VTB are not responding to calls for comment on this week’s exit. (more…)

by Editor - Friday, March 2nd, 2018
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